^{Drag Queen Story Hour / City of West Hollywood / flickr}

There’s a storm brewing in a library near you. Libraries used to be carpeted sanctuaries where school children studied, old ladies read and librarians in sensible shoes patrolled whispering ”shush!”

No more. A number of community libraries have become culture war battlegrounds for the hearts and minds of primary school kids. The latest skirmish is the Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH).

Described online as “drag queens reading stories to children in libraries, schools, and bookstores,” the purpose of DQSH is to “capture the imagination and play of the gender fluidity of childhood and give kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models.” There are story hours across Canada, the United States and Britain; it is rapidly spreading in Australia. It is staunchly supported by the American Library Association as part of its policy of inclusion and supporting the marginalised.

Surprised? Take a look at some of the books.

Take The Gender Fairy. This popular book tells infants “only you know whether you are a boy or a girl. No one can tell you.” Any child psychologist worth their salt will tell you that infancy is a critical time for boys and girls to individualise -- for boys to begin to associate with and connect to the masculine and for girls to attach to the feminine. To sow weeds of doubt at this critical stage in the wheat field of an infant’s identity is nothing short of criminal.

My Princess Boy tells the “tale of a four-year-old boy who happily expresses his authentic self by happily dressing up in dresses, and enjoying traditional girl things”.

Then there is The Bravest Knight Who Ever Lived, for 5 and 6-year-olds which looks at a knight-in-training who “follows his heart and chooses the boy instead of the girl at the end of his journey”. This is a deliberate distorting of what should be a healthy stage of development for any young boy, which should include healthy friendship-attachment to his own sex as he explores and roots himself in his core identity. But no, the rainbow agenda requires a perverted and eroticised manipulation of all that is healthy.

The GayBCs is a LGBTQ-themed alphabet book for 4 to8-year-olds in which “four friends try on different identities while playing with makeup and costumes”. And we wonder why increasing numbers of children nationally are confused about who they are and are found to struggle with mental disorders and distress.

For children aged ten and upwards, among many titles there is The Stonewall Riots: Coming Out In The Streets. This engages pubescent kids with the incessant battle for LGBTQ rights based on the Stonewall Riots in June 1969, which teaches children to fight violently, if necessary, for the right to express their feelings above and beyond the law of the state.

From the plethora of books for teens there is Gender Identity: The Ultimate Teen Guide. This self-professed guide pontificates that, “contrary to popular education, gender is no longer an either "male" or "female" proposition. Today, it is increasingly important, especially for those coming into adulthood, to go beyond the concepts of gay, lesbian, straight, and bisexual when examining gender.”

Increasingly important for those coming into adulthood to go beyond LGBT? What type of insidious mind games and labyrinths are these authors trying to open up?

DQSH supporters maintain that their mission is simply to “teach love and literacy, gender diversity and acceptance”.

Yet only last September one drag queen named Dylan Pontiff, a gay man who helps organise DQSHs for pre-schoolers, admitted the purpose of the story hour is the grooming of the next generation. Pontiff boldly acclaimed, “we are trying to groom the next generation to not see the way that they just did.” Yes, there is a fight on to educate children beyond anything previously known, accepted and with indeterminable consequences.

This strategy is certainly working. One eight-year-old girl, Lucia McCulloch, who attended a DQSH with her mother during New York’s 2019 Pride Month, reported that “[the drag queen] was spreading that you don’t have to be a girl to do boy things, you can be transgender. It doesn’t matter what your gender is, only what you want it to be.”

For sure, girls can do some boy things, and vice-versa. And yet for a child to casually proclaim this while saying it doesn’t matter if a girl transgenders and has her breasts and entire womb surgically removed to pretend to become a boy is nothing short of insanity.

Contrast this to comments from psychoanalyst Dr Marcus Evans, who was until his resignation four months ago, governor of England's only government youth gender clinic, The Tavistock Centre.

Evans stated that clinicians have been too quick to give children and young people gender reassignment treatment when "this is the opposite of what needs to be done”.

"There is a lot at stake here as these decisions have far reaching consequences," he said while discussing the daily work of a clinic where over the past five years child referrals have risen more than 400 percent.

Another five employees have since resigned from the clinic believing the facility was “mutilating young children”, bringing the staff resigning in recent years to 18.

Another clinician said, “This experimental treatment is being done not only on children, but very vulnerable children who have experienced mental health difficulties, abuse, family trauma, and sometimes those [other factors] just get whitewashed. If someone was suggesting plastic surgery or any other permanent change we’d be saying, hang on a minute.”

Let’s be blunt. The goal of DQSH is to make children comfortable with LGBTQ ideology and behaviours. It seeks to normalise cross-dressing homosexual men in garish make-up and provocative women’s clothing who seem obsessed with reading gay and transgender themed books to very young children.

Many of these men lead bizarre lives as “adult” sex entertainers.

In March this year, two children’s storytellers at DQSH in American public libraries were found to be registered child sex offenders, with one having a history of working as a transgender prostitute.

Do we really want vulnerable children to emulate these gender-fluid, unabashedly queer performers? In the eyes of these kids, the adults who run story hours are trusted authority figures. The libraries have no right to betray that trust by setting before them morally perverse role models.

As one friend, who last year left the gay lifestyle, wrote to me:

“Many people who have never set foot in a [gay] club have a clouded vision of what a drag queen is. If I were to ask them if they could name any, they probably wouldn't be able to list anyone beyond Dame Edna Everage.

“I can assure you. This is not the type of drag queen I experienced frequenting the clubs of Melbourne over my 14 years on the gay scene. What you see on the TV has been watered down and polished up to desensitize the masses. 

“[Drag queens] called people up on stage or just point to people in the club and start ripping into them with disparaging comments about the way they looked, the way they dressed, their weight, the suburb they lived in, their partner. Anything to try and humiliate them. They were quick witted with tongues like poison. They didn't need to read off a script because they had been doing it for so long. The bible says ‘out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks’. What came out of their mouths was certainly not uplifting or encouraging.

In Perth, adult performers with stage names Donna Kebab and Perri Oxide read to young kids from a collection of queer picture books at a DQSH in a central bookshop. In Surfers Paradise, Gold Coast drag queens share queer stories with kids as young as five. Sydney has hosted DQSH in at least eight publicly-funded local libraries this year under the banner of Rainbow Family Storytime.

The storm has already hit America. Sohrab Ahmari, editor of the New York Post’s op-ed page, recently suggested that the American government should ban pro-LGBT story hours at public libraries. He argued that “progressives understand that culture war means discrediting their opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions. Conservatives should approach the culture war with similar realism.”

The challenge that mainstream society faces with DQSH is this: remaining silent will inevitably continue to lead to harmful indoctrination. Those kids who are lured into the transgender lifestyle could even end up resorting to the surgical mutilation of a full transition and years of tortured regret.

We would do well to heed comments made in the recently released Vatican document entitled Male And Female He Created Them. The document endorses a “path of dialogue” which includes listening, reasoning and proposing, based upon “an integral anthropology, capable of harmonising the human person’s physical, psychic and spiritual identity.”

If we roll over and remain silent in the rising storm then we wittingly permit the gross abuse of children, masked as educational care – and our inaction authorises drag queens to hand out pink stickers to children that read: “Drag queen in training.”

James Parker is a former gay activist who today supports same-sex attracted people and their loved ones.